Kisses opens with a shot of a dead fish floating in its bowl. The color slowly drains from the image, until it is completely black-and-white, and we zoom out to see Kylie, a young Irish girl staring into the bowl. It’s aesthetically pleasing and set to atmospheric music, but Kylie doesn’t seem affected at all by what she sees, and once she turns aside to leave, she immediately forgets the fish, never to mention it again. The entire film is like this: Kylie, and her young neighbor Dylan, wander aimlessly about in a soft-focus, stylistically-cold world with generic music blaring over the soundtrack, and witness events that should be traumatizing, but have no impact on the children as soon as they turn away.

It’s Christmas in an Irish suburb so bleak it is literally colorless. Dylan (Shane Curry) plays video games while his parents drink and argue, while his neighbor Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) screams obscenities at her Ma and sister and stomps out to the yard. The two console each other, but it hardly helps when they have to return to their black-and-white lives. But it’s only a few moments before Kylie steals a wad of cash, and Dylan runs away from his drunken father to join her on a spending spree.

Then we spend ten minutes of the seventy-minute film watching them sit on a dredger. The plot is not advanced in the slightest, other than the two learning who Bob Dylan is when the irresponsible dredger captain (David Bendito) informs Dylan that he shares a namesake with a musical god. The barge drops them off in Dublin, and the captain waves them good-bye. In what has thus been a realistic, gritty film, are we to believe that an adult would whish two children away and drop them off in a far away city? But, as the color saturation informs us, Kisses has now become a gritty fantasy, not a gritty urban drama.

The rest of the film follows Kylie and Dylan through a stylistically-confused Dublin on a seemingly never-ending Christmas night. The decision to have Dublin in color and their suburb in black-and-white seems like more of a gimmick than an emotional barometer, as color has nothing to do with their emotions, and never rises to the level of saturation where it looks fantastic (as the sepia to color transition does in The Wizard of Oz), not even when the children feel they have entered a new world. Instead, it just sort of looks like a cheap documentary, one lucky enough to have a cameraperson with artistic leanings.  And when the story takes dark turns – the children encounter kidnappers, prostitutes, and corpses – the color and style remain the same, instead of reflecting the emotion of the scene or characters. Only the music fits the content, and even then, it’s not especially good music.

Kisses lacks the emotional punch that is needed to pull off its grittier black-and-white segments, the infectious joy to liven its colorized portions, and the narrative drive to maintain interest in the ramblings of these unaffected children. The images are pretty but superficial, and the childrens’ performances believable but lacking in depth. If you want to experience the pathos of youth, rent The 400 Blows; if you want a film from a child’s perspective about escape down a river, rent The Night of the Hunter. But don’t bother with Kisses; its love will leave you cold.